Tori Cotton
  • August 26, 2026

  • Tori Cotton, logic & philosophy of science graduate student, explains in this essay for The Prindle Institute for Ethics

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“This month, Americans have been taking their anger at license plate cameras into their own hands. Concern about technologies like Flock Cameras has grown alongside reports of their misuse. Take, for example, the Central Florida police officer who was accused of using Flock cameras to track his estranged wife’s vehicle hundreds of times. Organizations such as the ACLU have called Flock a major civil liberties threat. And amid mounting backlash, Americans have turned to spray painting, cutting down, and shooting down the cameras in droves.

It might seem that people across the country are becoming newly conscious of surveillance. But while we recoil from license plate cameras, there are millions of us willingly handing over our data to AI companies. We confess things to chatbots we wouldn’t even admit to our closest friends — like our deepest fears, secrets, doubts, and symptoms. We do so, at least in part, because these conversations are free, convenient, and come without the embarrassing social stigma of making these facts public record. But while our online confessions might feel private and inconsequential, they form a record of human behavior that’s both unusually candid and unusually valuable to the corporations that collect it.

I’ll call this record of human behavior our digital dirty laundry. We don’t need to look to Silicon Valley or tech talks for how to understand why it’s important. Instead (perhaps surprisingly), we can get insight on it from feminist thinking about race, class, and gender.”

Continue reading online at The Prindle Institute.

 

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